Page 70 of 107 Days

I was in the back of the plane, doing one of my usual off-the-record question sessions with the traveling press. One of the reporters, whom I had come to know quite well, furrowed his brow and asked, “What do you think is going on?”

We locked eyes for a long moment. Then I answered with the simple truth:

“I don’t know.”

After drawing even with Trump in the polls in August and pulling ahead of him after the debate in September, by mid-October, we’d stalled out.

The rallies were getting bigger, the crowds ever more diverse and enthusiastic.

But the poll numbers were static. Three weeks out, we were stuck in margin-of-error territory and not budging.

And then, like most guys who watch a lot of sports, Doug started seeing the trans ads.

No matter what he was watching—football, baseball—there they were.

The Trump campaign would eventually spend as much as $40 million on those ads.

They showed some version of it fifty-five thousand times in the seven swing states.

They showed it in all fifty states during sport broadcasts.

Gabrielle Ludwig, the basketball player featured prominently in the ad, was at home in Nevada watching an Eagles game when she was astonished to see herself, in a photograph that had been taken twelve years earlier.

She was fifty-two at the time of that photo.

A registered Republican, she’d served eight years in the Navy and had gone to community college later in life, as many veterans do.

She’s a big woman, but she also looks strikingly different from her teammates because she’s three decades older than they are, which hardly gave her the athletic advantage the ad implied.

Trump’s team wasn’t concerned with nuance. With the tagline “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” they thought they had landed on a winning message.

Unfortunately, they were right. Although not to the extent that has become conventional wisdom.

Why didn’t I punch back harder?

There are two things to talk about: one is people, one is politics.

Let’s start with people. Transgender people are Americans, with the same rights we all have, to liberty, equality, the pursuit of happiness, and equal protection under the law.

There aren’t very many. A tiny minority of less than 1 percent of the population.

Of these, in 2024, less than ten played on women’s college sports teams.

Less than ten.

The law says incarcerated people must be provided with medical care. Under that law, two federal prisoners have received court-ordered gender-affirmation surgery.

Two.

Very small numbers. But here are some bigger ones:

Three hundred and fifty transgender people were murdered in America in 2024. Fifteen of them were kids.

Trans people are over four times as likely as other Americans to be victims of a violent crime.

Almost half—42 percent—have attempted suicide.

I have been an ally of the LGBTQ+ community for my entire career. As AG, I fought for their safety by outlawing the so-called gay panic defense in California. As DA and then as AG, I defended their right to marry the person they love.

I have joyful memories of performing some of the first gay marriage ceremonies in 2004, long before it was the law of the land and long before it was supported by most elected Democrats.

In the 2004 presidential election, gay marriage was used as a wedge issue by Republicans, just as the trans issue was in 2024.

And I’m sorry to say that in 2004, our candidate did not stand up.

In the Bay Area, I grew up at the epicenter of the fight for LGBTQ+ civil rights. One of my first political advisers, Jim Rivaldo, had worked for the assassinated gay leader Harvey Milk. When Jim was dying from AIDS, my mother helped take care of him.

This is a community with which I have a deep connection.

I know transgender people. I know the parents of transgender kids.

Beloved kids, just like any other. I know the pain and struggle that many families go through.

I’ve heard so many personal stories. And I know the risks many of these children face from bullying and violence.

Imagine being a parent, loving your child and worrying every day about the ugliness and attacks they might encounter.

And for some families there are acute worries about depression, substance abuse, suicide.

It’s the height of hypocrisy for the party that has always championed the right of parents to make decisions for their children regarding homeschooling or opting out of sex ed to suddenly bring down the awesome power of the state on loving parents trying to figure out care for their children.

When Republicans lied about this tiny, vulnerable group with fear campaigns about schoolkids being taken away for gender surgery without parents’ knowledge, I knew that Trump’s increasingly hateful rhetoric was painting a bull’s-eye on their backs and putting them in peril.

I’ve always been a protector. It’s why I became a prosecutor.

There was no way I was going to go against my very nature and turn on transgender people right when they were being so intensely and intentionally vilified.

I was aware of the weight of my voice and had no intention of adding to their burden.

And then there is the politics.

When I was AG in 2015, a state prisoner sued to get gender-affirming surgery.

My client was the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, and, as its lawyer, I was required to support the case against that inmate, which we settled in the inmate’s favor.

In 2017 a transgender prisoner in California was the first to get gender-affirming surgery based on that case, and twenty-two others have followed in California. That’s the law.

But because I’d been on the opposing side of the case, a cry went up: Kamala doesn’t care about trans people .

That wasn’t true. I wanted to rebut that claim.

When the ACLU, in 2019, asked me to fill out a questionnaire, and one of the questions was about gender health care for incarcerated adults, I said I supported whatever was medically necessary.

(Which is what the law says and what Donald Trump upheld as president.

During his term, trans people in federal prison received the hormone treatments they were seeking.) I reiterated that view when asked in an interview.

And that was what the Trump team sliced and diced for their ad.

The ad also said that I supported “biological men competing against our girls in their sports.” That’s not my position.

I agree with the concerns expressed by parents and players that we have to take into account biological factors such as muscle mass and unfair athletic advantage when we determine who plays on which teams, especially in contact sports.

With goodwill and common sense, I believe we can come up with ways to do this, without vilifying and demonizing children.

The pundits proclaim as conventional wisdom that the ad was Trump’s knockout punch, that this was the principal factor that stalled us out in mid-October. I believe that it is the conventional wisdom of middle-aged men who don’t live in battleground states and were the target of those ads.

Men, like Doug, who watch a lot of sports.

The first time he saw the ad, he wanted to yell at the TV screen.

He told me, “It made me viscerally ill.” He was hearing clamor for a rebuttal from Joe Scarborough, Bill Clinton, and Democrats who saw that ad during the World Series and didn’t see any ads rebutting it from our side.

Because we didn’t run ads during baseball games in non-battleground states.

We did our best to rebut it in battleground states .

The approach that worked best in our testing was to say, Trump says a lot of things about me, but I know the thing you care about is the economy , and quickly pivot to our messages on price gouging, affordable housing, and small-business tax relief.

And that was the ad we ran in rebuttal in the swing states.

I do not regret my decision to follow my protective instincts. I do regret not giving even more attention to how we might mitigate Trump’s attacks.

Character matters, and voters respect it.

When I was DA, I did not seek the death penalty in a case I successfully prosecuted for the murder of a police officer.

There were demonstrations, death threats.

The AG—a Democrat—and the US attorney tried to take the case away from me.

I thought my career was over. Years later, an elderly man from a conservative part of town approached me.

“You know, I didn’t agree with your decision.

But I respect the fact that you said who you were and what you were going to do. And you stuck with it.”

I wish I could have gotten the message across that there isn’t a distinction between “they/them” and “you.” The pronoun that matters is “we.”

We the people. And that’s who I am for.